Hi guys, Kris from Custom Fitness here, your Amarillo personal trainer. Today we’re going to be talking about the too often overlooked solution to achieving long term relief from the majority of your pain problems. This is going to be the first part in a two part series, so be on the lookout for part two coming soon. And if you have any questions about today’s blog, then please give us a call at (806)-322-3188
Getting pain relief: It’s everywhere, from commercials, the infomercials, on the radio, even talking to people and stuff, you see these silly things. So I love the infomercials where they’re doing the crunches and they’re talking about the pain in your neck and the pain in your back and all these things, and how terrible it is, and they make it look so awful, right? Well, we suffer from those things, we suffer from neck pain and back pain, but why? We suffer from them because we’re at work all day, right? Or maybe we’re going out doing things that maybe we haven’t trained to do or we have taught our bodies how to do them right.
So what is the solution right now? Well, if you go back to the TV, you’re looking at anything from aspirin to pain relief cream to braces to even tens units you can wear on that help to relieve that pain. The problem is you’re basically putting a bandaid over the pain. You haven’t created a solution. You haven’t taken away that pain 100%. And so what happens when you put a bandaid on is you have to take it off and put more on, right?
So if you put on a cream, you constantly got to put on more cream. If you’re taking a pill, you got to take more pills. And there’s some pains they’ll give you that we need those things for and that’s fine. But if that’s the only route that you’re looking out to take away this pain and become your solution to long term relief, then you’ve got some issues there because you’re not going to find that long term relief from the band aid solution.
So what we’ve got to look at is really from a different angle. So there was this commercial where this guy was going and picking up tennis balls all the time, right? And so he’s run out and he’d grab the tennis ball and come back. And the commercial for a pain relief cream, I believe, and he’d run out and he’s grab the tennis ball and he’d yell out, grab his back and stand back up and run back over, and they made this huge thing about it, of course, because they want you to know that he’s in a lot of pain and he had to use this cream because they’re willing to sell you anything.
Well, we take that same picture and we look at it from a different angle, and we start to realize that perhaps he is not bending down correctly, perhaps he is flexing his spine incorrectly and not using his core to support him when he does that. It may sound silly, but that’s enough to give you back pain over time. And the only silliness there is the fact that as we grow, for some reason, we decide that we shouldn’t have to think about how our bodies contract, that we should have to hold our stomachs in or lift or move properly, and the truth is that our bodies were always meant to have that intentional focus. We’re always meant to use an intentional focus.
For some people who say long ago, I did hard labor every day or maybe they do it now, they’ve taught their bodies how to do that automatically. So they don’t have to think as hard. But for those of you maybe sit at a desk all day or even mom’s with kids, we get so tired. We’re in the same positions all the time and then we’ve got these heavy loads to pick up, and all of a sudden you reach down, pick it up, and you’ve done something wrong.
I actually have a client who had to take a break for a while because she had been in your fitness journey and then she had stopped exercising and kind of got into a different realm of life for a little bit. And during that different realm of life, she reach down to pull a weed out of her driveway, since then she’s had a back surgery to fuse two vertebrae and many hours of physical therapy to work through the issue that she caused just from pulling that one weed.
Now, after she got through the healing process and after went through her physical therapy, then she came to us and was able to rebuild past function because therapy always takes you to functional, which is great, and then now we can take your to optimal where she can move and be herself the way that she needs to be. But just that one thing, just bending over, picking up a weed caused her to really severely hurt her back in such a way that she had to surgery for it.
So if we just took a little time to kind of shift our perspective a little bit again, take it from a different angle, and we look at the actual cause of the pain, rather than just covering it up with cream or an aspirin or a brace or whatever it may be, but actually figure out what the cause of the pain is.
Perhaps it falls in one of the top three categories, which is usually going to be your posture, your movement patterns, and your activity level. So posture, if you’re not engaging and intentional about your posture, and that’s not just pulling your shoulders back and it’s not sucking in. It’s actually standing correctly to where you body is fully aligned and fully stabilized.
So i’m going to end part one here. In part two we’re going to be talking more about how to live without pain and get into what this “core” stuff is all about.
If can’t wait for part two, or you want to know more about Custom Fitness and what we do here, then please give us a call. If you’re wanting the accountability and help with creating an action plan to see results, or are wanting to someone to help create a workout plan to push you to your greatest potential, then that’s what we’re here for. Our trainers are here to look out for you and make sure that you are meeting your goals in a safe way.
At Custom Fitness, we customize a plan for you. We sit down with you and find out what your needs are and then build a health and fitness plan around that. We have an entire team of dedicated professionals to help you with your health and fitness goals. To get your consultation set up, give us a call at 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz At Custom Fitness, we are YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo, Texas. Have a great day.